Pupils and parents were not the only ones on tenterhooks this summer as the day for GCSE results approached. Some of us in the Oxford Classics faculty were expectant too, for this was the first year when our own Outreach Scheme GCSE Latin group would take the exam. GCSE takers have usually had 250+ hours’ teaching for each subject; our group had much less, only two hours each Saturday morning for two-and-a-half years. But still they did very well indeed – nineteen passes at A*–D level, including three A*s and three As. The scheme started in winter of 2007–8. It is one thing to go to a school and give a taster of something classical; the difficulty has always been to give some follow-up to that first contact.

Best way, we thought, was to run a pilot class and see how it went. The response was overwhelming: we ran two pilot classes side-by-side, and even so we could not take everyone who wanted. Still, we thought, there were bound to be drop-outs. Some would surely not like it; some would simply find they didn’t have time; some would be rather different people at sixteen from what they had been at fourteen. But in fact enthusiasm lasted till the end, and we lost only four along the way.

Who was going to teach them? First thought was to do it ourselves; second was that we might be hot stuff at teaching Latin but not at teaching children, and that so concentrated a course needed professionals. We were lucky in the local teachers who agreed to do it, Sponsorship from OUP provided the Oxford Latin Course for one group, and from CUP the Cambridge Latin Course for another. Thus on a cold morning in February 2008, we were away.

How do the students feel about it now? They don’t think of Latin as the ‘dead language’ which many call it, and have been happy to consider be part of a minority of state school pupils studying Latin- that sort of course seems too often to be reserved for public school pupils. As one student explained, ‘everyone in the class wanted to learn. It didn’t feel like the normal school lesson.’

Teachers as well as pupils have found it rewarding. ‘Latin isn’t easy,’ says one teacher, ‘and people who have been effortlessly good at everything else find they have to try. That challenge can alarm – or it can inspire. I think that’s why they got up on Saturday mornings for two years. They were inspired, they discovered a world they hadn’t known was there through the ideas and stories of the ancient Roman writers. It was an inspiring class to teach!’

What now? There are two new generations starting classes, one of them in Oxford and one in Chipping Norton, again with full support from the Faculty; St Edward’s School, Oxford is also supporting. As for our first students, we hope that some will have the chance to study classical subjects in the sixth form and perhaps at university. Even those who do not may well find in thirty years’ time that they are the ones who can explain what a Latin inscription means. If so, they will look back proudly on those Saturday mornings long ago.

The popular historian should produce their facts and state their case in a manner which can capture the imagination of the man in the street. Everyone should be able to understand what he is on about and come away better informed about the world and their place in it. Niall Ferguson rather tightropes between the popular and the academic. His books are rigorously researched. But they are about decidedly populist things and are perhaps deliberately contentious. All the same, he is amongst our best historians. He is able to take a big slice of history and boil it down so that it not only says something new but is accessible to a wider audience.

Ferguson is sometimes described as ‘controversial’, which is fair enough. Some believe that Ferguson is a white supremacist, apologist for empire, and opponent of equality and diversity in the classroom. Of course, such opinions are founded on existing political predjudices, always articulated by those who, like me, are Ferguson’s political opponents. Certainly Ferguson is markedly right-wing, and in my view rather Whiggish in his histories. (Whiggish, by the way, is somewhat technical jargon for a belief in moral progress towards nineteenth-century Protestant capitalist parliamentarianism, but you’re probably not interested.)

Notionally, the Tories have appointed Ferguson to a post advising the government on reforming the history curriculum. But, as he wearily remarks from behind a barrage of checked-shirt professionalism, ‘there’s no formal structure at all. I’m not even sure Simon [Schama] has been appointed Tsar. It all exists in the imaginations of journalists because of a few informal and rather spontaneous conversations at Hay. At this stage we’re just talking about what might be done better in history in schools.’ It looks like his opponents might have less to worry about than they hoped.

On the other hand, Ferguson has some very strong opinions about what could be done better. ‘Far too many people give up history too soon compared with our continental counterparts. We need to make it compulsory for another year. And we’ve got to stop teaching it in these segments that aren’t connected. Through accident or design people leave school only knowing about Henry VIII, Hitler and Martin Luther King Jr. That is not a caricature. The extent to which huge proportions of time are devoted to the Third Reich is just extraordinary. So my preference would be for people to cover a broad sweep of history, to get some sense of the narrative arc of history. That should be done at both the level of national history, but also at the global and international level. I think the need for history to be taught as world history is very, very important.’

His own work is noticeably broad. He has written volumes on the British and American Empires, the First World War, the Rothschilds and financial services. This lack of focus extends to the education system. ‘I don’t see any particular period as exceptionally important. For me the really important thing is to get the continuum so that when somebody leaves school they’ve got a sense of the major events that produced the country and the modern world. It’s not as if I’d say God, we’ve really got to do the English Civil War or the reign of Henry VIII. Every historian that I read when I was your age was making a grand claim about his or her little sub-period- “oh it was the Tudor revolution in government, oh it was this oh it was that.” Come on guys. The truth is that there isn’t actually some kind of super-seminal event. Macaulay thought it was the Glorious Revolution, which magically produces modern Britain. It’s a continuum. That’s how history works.’

Ferguson is perhaps a tad elitist in his view of history at the centre of the curriculum. To be fair he seems to mostly be interested in knowledge being gained for its own sake. That, he says, is something we’ve lost sight of. ‘It seems to me that ignorance of ancient literature and culture is one of our major aesthetic problems. In my view a properly educated person, even at school, should learn not only modern but also ancient history. It’s an important part of what makes Western civilisation special – the Greeks even more than the Romans but the Romans too. This is the great danger: that we take a crude utilitarian view of education. “If it’s not going to help you work for Samsung forget it.” I mean, tcha!’

The danger of the end of historical excellence is something which Ferguson is extremely concerned with. His mole-like Scottish eyebrows furrow at the thought. ‘If decline continued at its rate, then in fifty years’ time we would have achieved a total ignorance of history on behalf of people leaving school. We’re very close to letting that happen. I mean it’s astonishing if you look at surveys of school leavers and university entrants, just complete ignorance of the past – shocking ignorance. If you’d told me the survey was of drop-outs from secondary school in an inner city I would believe it. But university entrants and even people taking courses in history! They know nothing! What exactly this strange thing is called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? I would say probably 98% of people leave British schools without knowing that’s the name of their country. Why bother, you know?’

Ferguson has an acute sense of excitement about the past. He was a Magdalen man who taught here and Cambridge. Then the books were published, and the money rolled in. No longer tied down by tutorial commitments, he is free to pursue a Jamie Oliver-like campaign for better education. This includes visits to schools. ‘I had a very exciting conversational class with a bunch of working-class kids in the East End earlier this year. We spent the morning talking about what might be an interesting way of looking at the past. And my sense was that there’s enormous potential and enthusiasm for history even the bottom 10 or 20 per cent in educational attainment. So I don’t see this as being part of the top ten set. Everybody in this country – and the same could be said of any country – needs to have a sense of the context within which their lives unfold. They seemed extremely excited about the big questions of history – why did the West dominate the rest?’ (A rather catchphrasey catchphrase which I don’t like.)

I hate to be technical – alright, I don’t – but I asked Ferguson which historians he liked best. ‘Gibbon is still the greatest of the English-speaking historians, without question. Also Friedrich Meinecke – there are few more profound historical essays than his Causality and Values. And I was always a great admirer of A. J. P. Taylor.’ His First World War: An Illustrated History is one of my personal favourite history books. Ferguson agrees. ‘It’s a wonderful introduction to the subject. And it does show up something of the accidental error-strewn character of the war. It is in many ways not a comedy of errors but a tragedy of errors.’ And that’s that. ‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for me.’

What happened?

Three Oxford students were mugged last week in what appear to be arbitrary and unrelated attacks. While there were two stabbings in Cowley at the start of term, these took place in the heart of Oxford – one right outside Keble and one at 9.30pm.

Third-year Laurence Osborn was assaulted by five men who stole his phone, broke it, and sent him to A&E for his trouble: ‘I’m having flashbacks’, he says.

Thankfully that’s not a problem for Ian Maconnachie, who was punched unconscious on New Inn Hall Street: ‘I’m quite light-hearted about the whole thing’, he remarked, ‘but it was so avoidable’.
In the same week a 23-year old student had a bottle smashed on him at the corner of South Parks Road and St Cross Road. The man was walking with a group of friends when he was confronted by a larger group of people at around 10.45pm.

And is this really news?

Dreadful as these attacks are, violent assault is unfortunately nothing new in Oxford and the Cherwell archives yield legions of similar stories. Not even the hallowed halls of the colleges are safe: in 2001 a gang of thugs hurled a piece of scaffolding through the windows of St John’s while communion dinner was in process.

In 2005, a second-year was subjected to sexual assault off Cowley Road and in another extreme case earlier that year saw a middle-aged woman assaulted in the Turf Tavern itself. This is clearly not something limited to dark suburban backstreets: in 2006, incredibly, a student was assaulted in their own college room after being followed in by a burglar.

Of course, no news is arguably good news, but it’s still important for people to know that these things do occasionally happen and to be slightly more wary.

What now?

Bluntly, this sort of thing happens overnight rather than stops over night. And unless people stop going clubbing or pubbing, students will still need to walk about at night. Unless you’re on Broad Street or High Street, there’s not much chance of finding a policeman on one of these night-time excursions, and everyone has to walk back by themselves at least occasionally. With all these budget cuts, you’re unlikely to find a policeman anyway. So, short of buying a large and visable weapon, things more or less come down to luck and hoping that a particular bunch of louts aren’t going down the road at the same time as you are. Perhaps don’t parade that college scarf or vibrant Gucci as much as you might? It’s advisable to avoid the darker and quieter roads, but with attacks happening outside the King’s Arms that’s unlikely to help much. Oxford students might just have to remember that these things are rare, and that it can be much, much worse elsewhere.

How powerful are supercomputers?

The term ‘supercomputer’ has been used since the 1960s to describe the fastest and most powerful computers in the world. They are used for the most challenging computational problems: for example weather forecasting and climate research and simulating the formation of stars and galaxies. Computer speed is measured in ‘Flops’. This means the number of ‘floating point operations’ per second (eg. one addition or one multiplication). Modern laptops and PCs are rated around 10 billion Flops or 10 GigaFlops. The fastest supercomputer at present is more than a hundred thousand times faster- nearly 2 quadrillion Flops or 2 PetaFlops.

How have they changed over the years?

The earliest supercomputers had a single processing unit. In the 1970s ‘vector’ supercomputers were developed which had processors that could start on the next multiplication before the previous one had finished, thus speeding up the calculation. In the 1980s most supercomputers consisted of a modest number of vector processors. The nature of supercomputers changed drastically in the 1990s with a move to ‘parallel’ architectures. Parallel computers have large numbers of processing units which all work together. The earliest parallel supercomputers had hundreds of processors but the largest machines now contain hundreds of thousands of processors.

What are supercomputers used for?

In some cases computer simulations using supercomputers can provide information that cannot be provided through experiments, or a supercomputer is either safer or cheaper than performing experiments. One example is car crash testing. Before supercomputers began to be used, it cost roughly £300,000 to perform a single car crash test. If these tests were not done and a new model coming off the production line failed the legal crash tests the car would have to be redesigned at vast cost. The cost of each car crash test was almost dominated by the cost of hand building each car to be tested. Once accurate simulations of car crash tests could be performed on supercomputers, which happened around 1990, car companies were able to save millions by performing virtual car crash tests for each new model.

What’s the future for supercomputers?

In the last few years, a number of supercomputers have been built using GPGPUs (general purpose graphical processing units which are based on the technology used in graphics cards) and it will be interesting to see whether this technology dominates the Top500 lists in future years. There are concerns about the energy consumption of supercomputers and about our ability to develop software that allows all the individual processors to work together on a single problem. There are plans to build an ExaFlops supercomputer (a million, million, million Flops) by 2018.